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8 Ways to Save Time Brewing Beer

Start with hot water
Rather than cold water, start the brewday by adding hot water from your tap into the mash tun.

30 minute mash.
Try it. I am. I’ve read that most conversion happens in the first 10 minutes.

Use a Bag to Mash
Brew in a Bag has huge time savings. When the mash is done, the boil begins immediately. Crank the heat, take the bag out, and wait for the boil. If you want to sparge, you can (that takes no extra time with BIAB…you simply pour water over the grains while you’re waiting for boil). In other systems, sparging and transferring (to another vessel) take extra time.

Water heats faster with the top on
While waiting for the boil, try putting the top on your pot (just like you were making spaghetti). It will get to a boil faster. I tried this last time, and was impressed with the time savings.

chill to to 100 degrees
Instead of chilling all the way down to 70, chill to 100 and then add a half gallon or so of cold water (from the fridge) to make 5 gallons (that’s called a “concentrated wort”…I believe Charlie P talks about this in his famous book). You just went from 100 to 75 in no time, and saved a lot of time. This technique works well with my system for other reasons. I basically end up with about 4.8 gallons of wort after the boil (roughly…I don’t care too much about it), and this bring it back up to 5.5ish.

zero sanitizing
In One Pot Brewing, I mash, boil, and ferment in the same pot…therefore, I don’t sanitize anything. I’m boiling it.

zero cleaning
In One Pot Brewing, the very little I have to clean (bag, strainer, spoon…wow, is that really it? nice) – anyway, I can easily clean it while I’m waiting for the boil. That means no clean-up afterwords. Previously, I would have to clean the brew kettle. No more. I don’t have to clean that until bottling day.